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UK University Researchers Must Make Data Available
Sara Chan writes "In a landmark ruling, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office has decided that researchers at a university must make all their data available to the public. The decision follows from a three-year battle by mathematician Douglas J. Keenan, who wants the data to do his own analysis on it. The university researchers have had the data for many years, and have published several papers using the data, but had refused to make the data available. The data in this case pertains to global warming, but the decision is believed to apply to any field: scientists at universities, which are all public in the UK, can now not claim data from publicly-funded research as their private property."
There's more at the BBC, at Nature Climate Feedback, and at Keenan's site.
The public pays for gathering the data, the public should have access to that data. Kinda hard to find fault with that.
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no, peer review is good. It helps to point out mistakes or inconsistencies. Getting rid of scientific journals is quasi-good (less profit motive in science, but also less chance to get work out there).
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
"Scientists" scared of goofy analysis are priests, not scientists. Take their funding away and use their PhD parchment for toilet paper.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
On the other hand, this will likely produce a whole stream of deliberately inaccurate analyses with ulterior motives behind them.
But with the data public, it'll be easier to shoot them down for picking, choosing, skewing, and what else.
There is no reason why this kind of data should ever be "secret"
Phil Willis, a Liberal Democrat MP and chairman of the Science and Technology Select Committee, said that scientists now needed to work on the presumption that if research is publicly funded, the data ought to be made publicly available.
That doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Appendices with raw data are often included already in the online editions of journals. Of course, if the ruling applies to all data generated in the course of a study, whether it is used in publications or not, it could be onerous indeed.
Does this mean every biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering research group (I'm talking about grad students and postdocs, here) would have to open their lab notebooks to anyone who asked?
Researchers who ply their trade on the cutting edge of science live in perpetual fear of being "scooped" by another group who publishes their discovery first. These are sometimes literally "races." So now a group at one university could demand access to the notebooks of a group at another university? And vice versa?
Not at all.
It means they have access to each others results and source data when published (once the group is done researching this phase, and is ready to publish). There's no "opening notebooks", simply because that's a terrible metaphor for how data is collected these days.
You only have to publish your data after publishing your article, which means "you won". You don't have to publish data for a research in progress.
That doesn't matter. The important thing is that the attacks are made. Even if every one is shown to be completely wrong, people will still remember all those (erroneous) anti-global warming reports. Especially since the media will enthusiastically report the initial attack and relegate the news of its rebuttal to a small paragraph on page 34, if they report it at all.
The NSF has recently taken more of an interest in research data management. They're definitely starting to make it a requirement of grant funding that the research data be digitally stored, backed up, and, after a cooling-off period to allow the principal researchers to publish, made available to the public. I'm working on a research data management group at my university, and the researchers generally seem open to the idea, though they're loathe to put in any extra effort to make it work.
But with the data public, it'll be easier to shoot them down for picking, choosing, skewing, and what else.
Not sure what regulations are on "release all data to the public" but seems like there are loopholes big enough to drive a bus through. For instance, in my field, no one but me knows how many cells I looked at. Maybe that thing I said happens in these cells happens in all those cells. Maybe I looked at 300 before seeing one doing what I said, took a picture of that one, and that was that. All my data would be that one cell I cherrypicked.
Even if I did take pictures of all 300, no one knows but me. Those other 299 can dissapear.
If I'm -not- evil though, this could hurt me. If I looked at say 3000 cells, and 10 were doing a thing that I thought was significant, I could have my reasons. Maybe the other 2990 were the wrong cell type or something. Being the expert, that might be obvious to me just from looking at them. A non expert looking at them might not see that. They would just see that out of 3000 cells, I chose the 10 that supported my data. They might call foul without bothering to have me explain myself.
There's no reason the data should be secret, but most data doesn't stand on it's own, and writing up supporting information to -all data gathered- just isn't going to happen.
errr... no always.
Putting data into peoples hands whoa aren't experts often leads to bad things. See every non expert who believed Wakefield study because they didn't understand how to interpret data. In that case kids died , and kids are still dying.
In principle I agree with you, but we live in an are where everyone thinks they are a qualified expert in anything. That simply isn't true, and no good will come out of this.
The data wan't show a flaw in the study because it wasn't used, but he will inevitably cherry pick data to 'prove' the study is wrong. And people like Hannah Devlin are always happy to publish claims without proper study. So no good can come from this, and people need to understand that.
It's hard problem to solve.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I don't know. The USA (and a lot of other countries) might not be too happy since it means releasing the UK is saying it's OK for these scientists to release the USA's proprietary data. So I guess, you're right in that those jerks like the USA (and a lot of other countries) that wanted to profit from this data will get their comeuppance, but I wonder if we now need to increase taxes in order to pay for these services that used to make a profit. So that means that we all need to pay more money because of this.
I also wonder what it means for the university to release data that is illegal for them to release. I mean, on one side the court says they need to release it, but on the other side other courts say it's illegal to release it. Should be interesting in the UK for a while.
If people cannot replicate your results it isn't science.
And with Climate Science part of the process is showing how you collected and interpreted the data. If you are not willing to share the raw data so other researchers can attempt to replicate your methods and results then don't bother publishing.
MOD PARENT UP!!
The problem that the climate scientists have created for themselves is that they are hiding the data from everyone. Up until a few months ago, these requests were relatively rare. Some of the requesting parties actually have fairly strong credentials. Steve McIntyre may be hated by the folk at realclimate, but he is an IPCC reviewer. To stonewall him is a little different than refusing to provide it to Jenny McCarthy.
As opposed to the proselytizers who are funded by the NGO's and the new "Green" capitalists and rent-seekers.
One of the more interesting bits of the Climategate emails showed that Mann was happy to share his data EXCEPT to people who he thought would disagree with his methods and results.
And in this case Mann was also the recipient of the tree ring data showing that again if you agreed with the owners ideas he had no problem getting you copies of what you needed.
Opening the data up for free access means that other groups, who have more interest in scooping than being right, have more ability to do that scooping. That leaves the people who did the work in the cold.
That is not hard to achieve: someone has to make an FoI request, the cost to prepare the data has to be estimated, someone has to get hired to collect and format the data and then the data is released. That can take a considerable amount of time.....but that's not the only issue. In my field of particle physics raw data is generally useless unless you understand how it was collected and how to analyse it.
Even assuming that you had several petabytes of disk/tape available to store it, raw data from ATLAS would be completely useless to you unless you really understand the detector "warts and all". Trying to understand this data without access to the detector itself and the ability to test and cross-check ideas looking at (and sometimes carefully tweaking) the hardware is literally impossible....and that is before you get into the thorny international issues about who did what and so whether it falls under any one country's laws.
These issues were discussed on a previous experiment I worked on in the US and the conclusion was that it did not serve the public to have data released in just about any form: the raw data was useless and even the processed data still had considerable "quirks" which required understanding (e.g. acceptance drops at detector boundaries etc.). This was aptly demonstrated by a pilot project which resulted in no interest at all from the public but which worryingly attracted a few nutters who were more interested in proving their pet theory than in doing science.
So while I am very sympathetic to the "the public paid for it the public should be able to access it" argument I do not think that the public's interest is best served by releasing raw data in all (most?) cases. The best way to serve the public interest is to ensure that results and ideas arising from that research are freely available to all and allow the public to build on that.
Unfortunately, Climategate proved that, at least in the field of climate research, "peer review" is worthless; Mann et al were actively conspiring to ensure that only "friendly" eyes carried out the reviews; anyone thought to be showing signs of scepticism were blacklisted, whether individuals or publications.
To add to that, Glaciergate proved that much of what was claimed to be peer-reviewed was actually just regurgitated propaganda, often based on anecdotal evidence (reminisces of mountaineers published in a student rag? Puh-lease!)
So, appeals to authority ("oh but all this research has been peer reviewed") just don't hold any more. Not until all the data and all the methods used to arrive at the results are made available, and the results can be independently confirmed or denied, can we say whether the research was worth the weight of mouldy notebooks it was archived on.
"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer
Simply generating massive amounts of data isn't considered science - figuring out what it means is. I say this as someone who is very good at generating data quickly, but not particularly good at interpreting it.
Spot on. I have a PhD in Comp. Sci. (Multi-Agent Systems / Market Based Control). One of the things you learn (maybe in you Universitity degree courses or in your first paper presentation) is that data does not mean *anything*, what matters is the interpretation of such data.
Nevertheless, I am of the opinion that programs used for the generation / manipulation of such data should also be free / scrutinable. Specially those developped during the research as they are also being paid by the tax payers money.
In the field I am working now (Agent based computational economics) a lot of people do these so called agent-based simulations, then they write a nice paper about what their simulations showed and try to publish it. The problem is that they keep their code! and in that respect they are deffinitely removing a good chunk of the "methods" part of their research. It is absolutely impossible to duplicate that work without the code.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
That is indeed an issue. Presumably the methodology is already published, as is the rule for scientific papers.
There is at least one case in =two climate research papers where what the methodologies claimed was impossible because the data to do it didn't even exist. This didn't come out for 16 years, and was only discovered because a FOI request was finally honored.
In this case, the authors of the papers had claimed that the station data that they used was from stations that had "few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times." (quote from one paper) and "selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times" (quote from the other paper)
"Hey! We only used great data!"
Now, these two authors used the same data, and one of these authors was actually a co-author of the other paper. These authors are Jones (hello climate gate) and Wang.
Now, they finally sourced the data as being from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which coincedentally had co-published a report with the US Department of Energy at about the same time as those two research papers, stating quite specifically that DATA OF THAT QUALITY DID NOT EXIST. The report was specifically about the quality of the Chinese climate record.
Both papers concluded that the Urban Heat Island effect was minimal. Too bad that they didn't actually have data good enough to draw that conclusion. They said they did, tho.
None of this would have come out if it wasn't for the Freedom of Information Act. Jones and Wang both obstructed the release of the data (denying FOI requests, etc) for nearly 2 decades.
This all came out several years ago, but the media didnt give a fuck. They did care about hacked emails tho. Go figure. Now, as it turns out it probably wasn't Jones who was lying his ass off. Wang was a co-author on Jones's paper and supplied the "data." Jones gets credit for having his email hacked.
"His name was James Damore."
But you haven't given a reason why it's actually bad
It wastes scientists' time that would be better spent analysing the data rather than releasing it, it wastes money collecting and disseminating the data, it pollutes the real scientific results with those of nutters trying to prove their pet theory and, in the case of commercially useful data, it risks having companies use the data to develop something commercially useful that will then be locked away behind patents and the public will be charged through the nose for.
There is also the more subjective, human issue that if you don't let people who have worked like crazy to get the data have at least the first shot at analysis then recruiting scientists is going to become extremely hard and motivating them to perform large-scale experiments will be even harder if they just have to give the data away - why would you bother if you can just sit around and get the data as soon as it is collected?
Is that bad enough? There are ways you could mitigate some of the above but the bottom line is that nothing is free: it will cost more money to make the data publically available and, as a taxpayer myself, I see no real benefit from doing it and some serious potential pitfalls.